Just got back from the Elizabeth Warren victory party at the Copley Plaza Hotel in Boston. Senator Kerry, Governor Patrick and Senator-elect Warren** all thanked Senator Scott Brown thanks for his service. John Kerry (who commented that he was not being Mitt Romney this night…;) spoke a hard-won truth: he said he knows what it’s like to lose a hard fought election.

Elizabeth Warren asked the crowd to join with her in applauding Brown for his efforts in office — noting her strong disagreements with him and the rigors of the campaign, but still asking her supporters to recognize Brown’s work. We did.

Speaking for myself, I was cheering the unequivocal nature of the vote — this was not in the end a squeaker, and I took both tribal and intellectual pleasure in that. Tribal: because it feels good to win; intellectual, because it’s vital to advance the idea of grass-roots democracy — and the notion that economic policy should permit the non-1% to thrive. But it was striking for me to see how Patrick, Kerry and Warren — especially Warren — explicitly sought to speak to Brown’s voters.

This is smart, I think, and I hope it will have the effect that it should: to gut the current Republican party. We can dance on the grave of the Romney campaign for some time — I plan to work on my two-step.

But when the glee subsides, the fact will remain that the GOP is both an asylum run by its inmates and a den of authoritarian and/or totalizing religious figures who reject the central premise of democracy: that society self governs through itereative decisions, and not from some set of revealed rules or via some charismatic Dear Leader.

In that context, I had an interesting interchange at the Warren party. Near one of the bars I ran into two reporters from Croatia. They asked me if I would go on the record and explain why I felt so much joy at this result. My answer: we don’t often credit how fragile democracy can be. This election could have validated a victory that conformed to the form of democratic process, while gutting the idea of informed consent of the governed. I said one more thing: central Europe has some experience of the evil that can result from this gap between form and actual practice of democratic governance.

That’s what think we dodged this time. A Romney victory would have enshrined both completely honesty-disdained political communication and the evolution of the Citizens Untited approach to elections.

That’s why the Massachusetts Democratic political establishment appeal to Republican voters is both masterful and essential: the work to come is to render the rump of America’s natural party of governance so utterly irrelevant as to create the space for a genuine opposition to form.

And I cannot tell you how happy that we are in a position to help shovel the dirt on that rump. You can put that image differently in the comments, and I surely hope you will.

Now, I’ve made a very important decision. I am going to switch from Balvenie to Baker’s Bourbon. America!

Have a happy.

I am.

*Not me, of course.

**need I tell you how much I loved writing that?

ETA: My wife and I knocked in 60 doors today in New Hampshire; she called a bunch more later in the afternoon while I was shepherding the sprout. Before today, I spent every Sunday for the last several somewhere in the southern tier of the Granite State, and I take personal satisfaction at our results there. It wasn’t that much: I know lots of folks here and lots of my friends and family who did a lot more. I’m deeply grateful to every one who did — and I thus want to echo our own Fearless Leader, John Cole, in his applause for everyone here who did so much work in what I continue to think has been the most important election of my fifty four years on this earth.

Rumor had it that Romney didn’t write a concession speech. I thought it was p.r. After seeing him concede, one thing was obvious: Romney didn’t write a concession speech. He must have thought he was going to win. Sorry, Mitt, NOPE.

This is such an important victory and we need to savor every drop – I’m staying out of the alcohol tonight so that I can function tomorrow (volunteering at the food bank again tomorrow as I have every day this week – I live in Sandy’s playground) but I’m already planning on taking many boxes of Victory Donuts to the food bank tomorrow!

Tom! Thanks for the description of the party. I poll watched all day in our lovely poll which is home to some killer amazing people and Mr.Aimai and I watched the returns on the blogs. Unable to face seeing any tv reports at all. Wish we’d been at the party. Party on!

Look, all this noise on MSNBC about Romney’s speech being good and gracious and dignified, well damn it should well have been. Romney ran one of the most divisive campaigns in modern history. His camp went places even McCain/Palin refused to go. His surrogates called POTUS non-American, dishonest, socialist, Muslim. He refuse to stand up to Rush Limbaugh and Fox News. Refused to stand up for women, immigrants, children, the poor, the sick, the middle class…NO ONE. He called 47% of the country moochers. So no, I’m not giving him nothing tonight. Maybe tomorrow maybe by the end of the week, but not tonight. Forget him!

I do have something positive to say other than writing about one dinky House race, although I see it mentioned in #2.

This was a victory for the belief that government can accomplish things. Taegan Goddard (whose Twitter feed is a delight today) put it quite well that the Republicans as a group put everything they had on obstruction and it didn’t work for them. The majority in the House is going to be ideological enough that it will still be very difficult to try to raise revenues, but the electorate trusted Obama to try to do the right thing and didn’t trust Mitt Romney, which was well deserved because he never trusted them to have easy access to what his specific plans were. As Ed Kilgore pointed out very early, the electorate from the exit polls looked like the electorate from 2008. The Obama coalition didn’t lose heart.

And Nate was seen to be, if anything, cautious with this election. His predictions are likely to understate the victory.

I’m going to clean out my email and see if anything is going to happen in the Nevada Senate race. I had one beer at dinner because I told my husband I was going to go to the McCaskill party and get drunk. But we were worried the McCaskill party was going to go past midnight so we stayed home.

I am so proud of my country that all the money and bullshit didn’t move it off the righteous path. Some day these Republicans will learn that money isn’t the measure of anything except how much crap you can buy.

@lamh35: Frankly, Romney’s lack of emotion, his robotic eyebrow wiggling and happy-face, in the context of what must be a really crushing loss for him, gave me the heebie jeebies. I think the nation did indeed dodge a bullet tonight; I think the man is all surface.

@Mnemosyne: Sigh. Does this mean I have to tell her about the NYD? :) Who BTW can ride a horse, so she will instantly love him. Then take him out on a ride to interrogate him. I done warned him. I don’t think he took me seriously.

In all honesty, this has great implications for some good college friends who almost had a major crisis when one gave birth. Now Jen will become her legal parent. I can’t wait for them to make it official! :)

Just sayin’, there’s a good side and a bad side to being treated like the rest of us. ;-) G has been hinting to me that, because I am the in-law, it’s my duty to have that talk with my brother-in-law because his mother is starting to worry about him still being single in his mid-30s and really couldn’t care less about the gender of the person as long as he settles down with someone.

(I was single for so long that I suspect my parents were pleasantly surprised to find out that I really was straight. I think they were bracing themselves for a totally different announcement.)

@Mnemosyne: It’s funny. I like him, a lot. And he actually will get kind of territorial around me which just cracks me up. But his life is going one way and mine is kind of going another. I’m not even going to mention the age gap (which doesn’t seem to bother him) which is rather large. I’m just gonna wait it out with him. He’s so damn busy right now I’m just shutting up and listening half the time. I think he likes that more than anything.

Elizabeth Warren asked the crowd to join with her in applauding Brown for his efforts in office—noting her strong disagreements with him and the rigors of the campaign, but still asking her supporters to recognize Brown’s work. We did.

I’m sure Mr. Brown’s supporters were equally gracious. Once someone interrupted their latest rendition of the tomahawk chop, that is.

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